SOPHIA (2011) 50:593–602

DOI 10.1007/s11841-011-0271-3

The Trial of Albert Camus

Russell Grigg

Published online: 21 October 2011

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract The fiftieth anniversary of Camus’ death in 2010 was largely ignored in his
native Algeria, reflecting the critical response to Camus’ writings that regards him as a
colonialist writer and apologist for the French domination of his native Algeria. This
critique also claims that Camus’ colonial attitudes are hidden and reinforced by a
European attitude that sees him as dealing first and foremost with universal questions
about the human predicament and existential isolation. However, Camus_ journalism
shows an Algerian closely identified with the destiny of all the peoples of Algeria, and
his novel The Outsider contains sufficient indications that, whatever its existential
importance, in the concrete situation of Camus’ Algeria the Arab has the precise status
of outsider.

Keywords Albert Camus . The Outsider . Said . Colonialism . Postcolonialism

Great was the embarrassment when in early 2010, the fiftieth anniversary of his untimely
death in a car accident on 4 January 1960, some people in Algeria planned to mark the
fiftieth anniversary of Camus’ death! No one wanted to know anything about the
occasion. Requests for support sat unanswered on desks in the Ministry of Culture.
Cultural services in the large cities went silent. Even the French cultural centres adopted
a low profile. A document, ‘For the attention of all anti-colonialists’, was being
distributed in universities, to newspapers and to journalists, alerting them to the ‘Camus
festival’ that would be, it said, tantamount to the rehabilitation of the old discourse of
French Algeria.1
In Algeria, the country of his birth and the setting for his two most famous works,
L’étranger and La peste, as well as of several shorter ones, Camus’ perspective is

1
Reported in ‘Á Alger, “Il n’est pas facile de défendre Albert Camus en 2010”’, Le Monde 20 February
2010. See also Kateb Yacine’s comparison between Camus and Faulkner at http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=EpXExBh7UR0.
R. Grigg (*)
Deakin University, Locked Bag 20000, Geelong, VIC 3220, Australia
e-mail: russell.grigg@deakin.edu.au
594 R. Grigg

still perceived as that of the colonialist. It is a fact that should come as no surprise.
As long ago as 1970 the American critic Conor Cruise O’Brien offered a detailed and
now celebrated critique of Camus in which he shows Camus to be a man committed
to the superiority of the European perspective.2 O’Brien’s thesis is that whatever
agonising Camus experienced over the war in Algeria, from 1954 until his death in
1960, he remained committed to a French Algeria, because of his conviction that only
in this way could Algeria be ‘improved’. O’Brien quotes Camus’ famous – or
infamous, as most now consider it – 1957 speech at the Salle Wagram in Paris:
The defects of the West are countless, its crimes and its faults real. But in the
final analysis, let’s not forget that we are the only people who hold that power
of improvement and emancipation which resides in the genius of freedom.3
You will find similar passages in Camus’ writings from the 1950s (the Algerian
War of Independence lasted from 1954–1962). He was an opponent of the war, was
categorically opposed to any form of negotiations with the Front de Libération
Nationale, or FLN, and grimly held to the belief that the future of Algeria lay in
remaining a part of France.
A more recent and equally significant discussion of Camus’ colonial attitudes can
be found in Edward Saïd’s celebrated work, Culture and Imperialism. Saïd was a
distinguished academic at Columbia University who came from a Palestinian
background, and so knew a thing or two about colonialism. Saïd is interesting
because, though a critic of Camus, he also acknowledges the greatness of Camus’
literature. There is, he says, something in Camus that transcends the particular
context in which it was written; for instance, he is ready to describe L’étranger as a
work in which Camus gives a universal dimension to the portrayal of existential
isolation.4 Nevertheless, he goes on to say, Camus, like every writer, also speaks
from a particular concrete historical situation, and in the case of Camus we need to
take particular care to describe this historical context properly and accurately
because we find it particularly difficult intellectually and affectively to judge him
objectively. Saïd commends Conor Cruise O’Brien for pointing out the Francocen-
trism of Camus and applauds O’Brien for making Camus’ readers in the English-
speaking world aware of his political support for French colonial authority and
supremacy over Algeria.5
Yet despite this positive assessment of O’Brien’s analysis, Saïd ends up
excoriating him for not seeing what Camus represents ‘objectively’, to use the old
Marxist term. He believes that O’Brien lets Camus off the hook by describing
Camus as a writer who belongs to the ‘frontier of Europe’; but, as Saïd says, this is
pure euphemism, and he is completely correct on this.6 Camus is writing as a
colonial Frenchman, and he is writing in and about one of France’s colonies. Thus,

2
O’Brien, C. C. (1960). Camus, Fontana Modern Masters.
3
‘Les tares de l’Occident sont innombrables, ses crimes et ses fautes réels. Mais, finalement, n’oublions
pas que nous sommes les seuls à détenir ce pouvoir de perfectionnement et d’émancipation qui réside dans
le libre génie’. Albert Camus, ‘Discours prononcé à la salle Wagram, le vendredi 15 mars 1957’, http://la-
presse-anarchiste.net/spip.php?article1021.
4
Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 208.
5
Culture and Imperialism, 209.
6
Culture and Imperialism, 209.
Trial of Albert Camus 595

rather than describe Camus as ‘representative of the Western consciousness and

conscience’, we need, O’Brien says, to see his writing as representing the ongoing
Western dominance over the non-European world.7 I would make Saïd’s point by
saying that Camus’ consciousness is that of Western dominance, and his conscience
is its symptom. Saïd aligns Camus’ novels and stories with ‘the traditions, idioms
and discursive strategies of France’s appropriation of Algeria’,8 and considers that
Camus should be seen as the last in a long history of French writers whose writing is
an incorporation of Algeria by the civilizing forces of colonial France.
Saïd thus rejects the reading of L’étranger that sees in it the ‘universality of a
liberated existential humanity facing cosmic indifference and human cruelty with
impudent stoicism’.9 Camus’ work is more accurately read as the final representative
of this colonial movement, which gives his narratives ‘a negative vitality, in which
the tragic human seriousness of the colonial effort achieves its last great clarification
before ruin overtakes it. They express a waste and sadness we have still not
completely understood or recovered from’.10
Most Western readings of Camus have been blind, perhaps wilfully blind, to this
reality, Saïd argues, and we find it ‘easier to interpret [Camus’] work as being about “the
human condition’” than to regard Camus as the inheritor of a long tradition of French
colonial writing on Algeria that is forgotten today or just simply ignored.11 Camus, he
says, comes to make claims (‘There has never been an Algerian nation’) that are as
preposterous as the declaration by a French Minister in 1938 that Arabic was a
‘foreign language’ in Algeria.12 This obduracy of Camus’ on the matter of colonialism
would not be so bad and conceivably could even be ignored, were it not for the fact that
it bleeds into his literary works. It is Camus’ obduracy ‘that accounts for the blankness
and absence of background in the Arab killed by Meursault’, for instance.13 There is
just the one solitary Arab with his generic name, no family, no life, and he dies, killed
by the French Algerian Meursault, on a beach near Algiers. This example points to
perhaps the biggest issue and the single most symptomatic feature of Camus’
eurocentrism – the anonymity of the depersonalised Arabs in his novels.
Indeed, in L’étranger, Meursault’s victim is only ever referred to as ‘the Arab’.
Actually, and this is an interesting point, Camus writes the word with a capital,
which you’d only do in French if it were a proper name, not a common noun. That
is, Camus doesn’t call him ‘an Arab’, but it’s rather as if he is giving him the name,
‘Arab’ (as if it were a name like ‘Mohammed’). His victim carries the generic name,
‘Arab’, as if it were a proper name; and it is this decision that effectively names him,
but in naming him, an act that individualises, it also renders him anonymous and
makes of him a token, indistinguishable from his Algerian brothers. The Arab is ‘not
quite a man’, as Conor Cruise O’Brien observes, adding, ‘The reader does not quite
feel that Meursault has killed a man. He has killed an Arab’.14 Compare this with the

7
Culture and Imperialism, 209.
8
Culture and Imperialism, 223.
9
Culture and Imperialism, 224.
10
Culture and Imperialism, 224.
11
Culture and Imperialism, 212.
12
Culture and Imperialism, 217.
13
Culture and Imperialism, 217.
14
Camus, 25-26.
596 R. Grigg

French Algerians, on the other hand, with whom we are on first-name terms: the
killer, Meursault, and his group of friends, Raymond, Marie, Masson – how
reassuring these names would have been to your French reader! How familiar they
are to us Europeans! . . . And then there’s the Arab, whose name is ‘Arab’.
These considerations lead to one inescapable conclusion: it is pitifully inadequate
to say that while the great novels are indeed set in Algeria, they might have been set
anywhere, the entire Algerian experience receding into the background. On the
contrary, they come out of and are a reflection of colonial relations, and it is we, the
European readers, who manage to make them into major texts that reflect upon the
great themes of Western thought by a complicit silence over and wilful ignorance of
the colonial, Algerian setting. Yacine’s comparison of Camus with Faulkner is
telling. In Faulkner’s literature Blacks are everywhere, and the theme of racism and
Black-White relations dominates; there is no escaping the issue. In Camus, on the
other hand, there is silence.
The colonial relations are even more prominent in the circumstances of the trial. The
inexplicable insignificance attached to the murder reflects the settlers’ indifference to the
life of a Muslim—and what is disturbing is that this indifference is so matter of fact.
What does one dead Arab matter to them, the French colonials? There were many
French pied noirs who, if they had had their way, would have done away with all the
Muslims in Algeria. They would have done it because it would be easier than doing
what colonisers have always done, which is to steal the land from the people who own
it, and they would not have to leave the indigenous people to starvation and misery.
There is a third dimension, partially hidden by the obscurity of the motivation of
Meursault’s act of murder. This is the question of fear, always something that marked the
settlers’ relations with the indigenous Muslim community. Muslims outnumbered the
French ten to one in French Algeria. The massacres at Sétif in Algeria in 1945, which
precipitated the Algerian uprising and the start of the war of independence, demonstrated
how brutal French repression could be when the French felt themselves threatened.15 At
Sétif the French military, police and settlers went on a murderous campaign in which,
it is reported, at least 6,000 Muslims were killed, quite possibly many more, in acts of
reprisals against the indigenous population; these were acts motivated both by revenge
and by a deep fear that the Muslims might rise up against them and throw them out of
Algeria. Sétif was counterproductive, as it turned out, as this incident became a
symbol of French colonial repression and a rallying point for the insurrection that
became the beginning of the end for the French in Algeria.
Camus was sensitive to this state of fear experienced by the French settlers. He
has written about it on more than one occasion, and we should note that the fear was
already there when he was a child in the 1920s. He recalls that his aunt would go
around the bedrooms of their farmhouse at bedtime ‘to make sure the huge bolts on
the thick, solid wooden shutters had been properly closed’.16 He even wrote, towards
the end of his life, that he felt ‘as if he were the first inhabitant, or the first
conqueror, landing where the law of the jungle still prevailed, where justice was
intended to punish without mercy’.17 Camus felt the menace of the Algerian people;

15
See Horne, A. (2006) A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962. New York: NYRB Classics.
16
The First Man (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), 217.
17
The First Man, 217.
Trial of Albert Camus 597

in this he was no different from any of the other French colons. As he also writes,
‘They [the Algerians] were so numerous in the neighbourhoods where they were
concentrated, so many of them that by their sheer numbers, even though exhausted
and submissive, they caused an invisible menace that you could feel in the air some
evenings on the streets when a fight would break out between a Frenchman and an
Arab’.18 As he says, a fight might just as easily break out between two Frenchmen or
between two Arabs, but, he tells us, ‘it was not viewed the same way’ as a fight
between a Frenchman and an Arab.19 So, what was the difference? As he explains it,
The Arabs of the neighbourhood, wearing their faded blue overalls or their
wretched coats, would slowly approach, coming from all directions in a
continuous movement, until this steadily agglutinating mass, by the mere
action of its coalescing, would without violence eject the few Frenchmen
attracted by witnesses to the fight, and the Frenchman who was fighting would
in backing up find himself suddenly confronting both his antagonist and a
crowd of sombre impenetrable faces, which would have deprived him of what
courage he possessed had he not been raised in this country and therefore knew
that only with courage could you live there; and so he would face up to the
threatening crowd that nonetheless was making no threat except by its presence
and by the movement it could not help making.20
Camus here evokes the famous spirit of the settlers and their courage before these
‘impenetrable faces’; but these are the faces of Algeria, Berbers and Arabs, who are
the ever-present threat behind the single ‘Arab’ with whom one gets into a fight. In
the days of French colonialism an Arab would be taking a great risk in allowing a
conflict with a Frenchman to escalate, knowing that when a Muslim fought with a
Frenchman the police would always take the Frenchman’s side. As Camus notes,
‘Most often it was [the Arabs] who took hold of the Arab fighting in a transport of
rage to make him leave before the arrival of the police’21.
Camus’ The First Man has an interesting history. Very closely based on Camus’
own life, the novel describes the dreadful poverty in which ‘Jacques Cormery’ was
raised by a mother for whom he is everything in her otherwise wretched life. It is the
life of an impoverished pied noir family, whose ancestors had come from Spain and
France to seek their fortune in French Algeria. The family, already poor, was
devastated by the death of Camus’ father, killed at the Battle of the Marne in 1914,
and Camus was raised by his widowed, illiterate mother. This unfinished work, the
manuscript of which was found in the car in which Camus was killed in 1960, was
not published till 1995 when Camus’ family and literary executors released it for
publication by Camus’ publisher, Gallimard. I was taken aback when I read, on the
front cover of my Penguin edition of the book in English, ‘The most brilliant account
of an Algerian childhood’, since I have no idea how one would even start to compare
Camus’ account with those of Assia Djeba or Kateb Yacine, Leïla Sebbar or even
Hélène Cixous.

18
The First Man, 217.
19
The First Man, 217.
20
The First Man, 219.
21
The First Man, 218.
598 R. Grigg

In summary, Saïd’s argument is that it is futile to distinguish Camus the activist

and the politically engaged thinker with his confused and outmoded views about
colonialism from the author of the novels, and pretend that the latter express another
story, another sentiment. This is where Saïd is so important; as a stateless Palestinian
Arab who found refuge in the United States and knows what it is like to be
colonised, he concludes that the ideological significance of Camus’ literature is to
justify French rule. This argument, the lesson of which is that we must see even the
most universal of Camus’ novels, The Outsider, as the cultural expression of
European imperialist domination, has proven very influential. Forcefully made and
argued in detail first by O’Brien and then, with even greater force, by Saïd, it has
dominated so-called postcolonial views about Camus.
Let me start to introduce into the discussion a different Camus, or, since he was
nothing if not a complex man, another side of the same Camus, by quoting the
French philosopher and sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. When Bourdieu was assigned
to Algiers on military service in 1955, he was transformed by the experience. He was
part of a generation of French intellectuals in postwar France who saw their state
betray its defining values of liberation and civilization, revealing, as one writer puts
it, ‘the sheer power that lay behind colonialism, despite its legitimation in terms of
progress’.22 During the war of independence he observed that in Algeria ‘the
European gradually created an environment that reflected his own image . . . , a world in
which he no longer felt himself to be an outsider, un étranger, and in which, by a
natural reversal, the Algerian was finally considered to be the outsider’.23
Bourdieu’s description accurately describes L’étranger in many respects;
Meursault is the outsider, to be sure, but an internal outsider to the French
community in Algeria, which has itself created an Algeria after its own image, one
inhabited by French citizens leading ordinary lives with their ordinary concerns.
I wonder however whether it is it possible to argue for a contrary view, one in
which this picture is inverted and, in particular, one in which, in becoming the
outsider, Meursault becomes Algerian. According to this reading, Camus is indeed
an Algerian writer. A French Algerian, to be sure, a pied noir, but one writing about
an Algerian reality that is not. To be sure, this Camus remains a writer with a
universal existentialist message, but this is because he is a great writer, and not
because he is a European writer. This Camus is also an essayist, and a chronicler of
the misery of the famines in the Kabyle in 1939 and of the post-war disaster of
Algeria.24 He is a writer who is unable to reconcile the raw experience of the savage
exploitation of Arabs and Berbers at the hands of French colonialism with the fine
sentiments he articulates when he says, in that fateful speech at the Salle Wagram in
1957 quoted above, ‘Let’s not forget that we are the only people who hold that
22
Calhoun, C. (2006). Pierre Bourdieu and social transformation: Lessons from Algeria. Development and
Change, 37(6), 1403–1415.
23
Bourdieu, P. (1962). The Algerians Boston. Beacon Press, 131. See also Yacine, T. (2004). Pierre
Bourdieu in Algeria at War: Notes on the birth of an engaged ethnosociology. Ethnography, 5(4), 487–
509; Le Seuer, J. D. (2002). Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of
Algeria. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, and in particular Bourdieu’s foreword.
24
Between 5 June and 15 June 1939 the newspaper Alger républicain published a series of 12 graphic
articles by Camus on a famine in this remote region of his country, the blame for which Camus very
frankly sheeted home to the French colonial government. See his Chroniques algériennes 1939 - 1958,
Actuelles III (Paris: Gallimard, 1958).
Trial of Albert Camus 599

power of improvement and emancipation which resides in the genius of freedom’,

and who thinks, wrongly, that the structural problem of French colonialism in
Algeria can be rectified if only the French make just one more effort.
While pointing to the absence of the indigenous Arab and Berber in Camus’
work, Saïd runs the risk of missing the complexities of the French-Algerian
relationship, with its unique characteristics. Saïd ridicules the French Minister who
declared that Arabic was a foreign language in Algeria. Whatever the political point
this remark was being used to make, it is an accurate observation. Arabic is no more
indigenous than French in Algeria, since while it penetrated Algeria very early on, it
only became established with the arrival of the Ottoman Empire in 1516. This may
be a quibble; the debate is also beside the point. Consider Kateb Yacine, one of
Algeria’s finest writers, who refers to French – the French language in which this
Algerian born writer frequently wrote – as ‘the spoils of war’.25 Or again, I refer you
to the Algerian woman writer, Assia Djebar, who declares that Algeria is a nation of
three languages: Berber, ‘a language of rock and soil, a language of origin’, she says;
Arabic, ‘a second language, from the prestigious exterior with its Mediterranean
heritage’; and French, ‘the third partner of this three-fold couple, which presents
itself as the most exposed of the languages, the dominant, public language, the
language of power’.26 Incidentally Assia Djebar, who is the daughter of an Algerian
schoolteacher, has said she finds in Le premier homme a detailed reflection, in
counterpoint as it were, of her own childhood experiences.
Let’s return to L’étranger. I would now like to argue that Saïd’s imperialist
reading of the novel is wrong on just about every point. I think that the reason for
this is that he is far too quick and far too facile in his reference to the ‘wider context’
of colonial literature. Let’s ask, what does the wider context show? Are we to
conclude, blindly, that Camus is merely continuing a long line of colonial literature,
as Saïd accuses? Or should we go the other way and consider that he is drawing on that
literature just so as to subvert it? How are you going to decide which is the more accurate
view if we are to base ourselves merely on a comparison of superficially similar themes?
To do so would be to follow the crudest and most simplistic of readings.
I’d also make a second preliminary point. Saïd refers to the inconsistency
between Camus’ novels and his journalism, an old criticism that goes back to
Conor Cruise O’Brien. Here is what O’Brien says: ‘Camus never did come to
terms with the situation in question [colonialism in Algeria], and his journalistic
writings are the record of his painful and protracted failure to do so . . .[though]
imaginatively he comes closer to it’.27 Thus, O’Brien explains this schism in
Camus by saying that Camus could reconcile himself to colonialism in his literature

25
He also declared – this was in 1966 – that ‘La francophonie est une machine politique néocoloniale, qui
ne fait que perpétuer notre aliénation, mais l’usage de la langue française ne signifie pas qu’on soit l’agent
d’une puissance étrangère, et j’écris en français pour dire aux français que je ne suis pas français’. ‘The
French language is a neo-colonial political machine, which only serves to perpetuate our alienation, but
using the French language does not mean that one is the agent of a foreign power, and I write in French so
as to tell the French that I am not French’.
26
Berber, ‘une langue du roc et du sol, disons de l’origine’; Arabic, ‘une deuxième langue, celle du dehors
prestigieux de l’héritage méditerranéen’; French, ‘troisième partenaire de ce couple à trois, se présente la
plus exposée des langues, la dominante, la publique, la langue du pouvoir’. Djebar, A. (2002). Le blanc de
l’Algérie. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 243.
27
Albert Camus, 26.
600 R. Grigg

(‘imaginatively’), but was never able to bring himself to this reconciliation in what
he had to deal with as a journalist.
I find this view of Camus to be far too schizophrenic to be correct. I can’t see how
a man as concerned for the suffering of his fellow Algerians as Camus was would
somehow foreclose all mention of this in his own ‘imaginative’ literature. So let’s
now return to L’étranger and focus on the narrative structure of the novel, and I’ll
make some suggestions as to how it can be read as consistent with and sympathetic
to the people of Algeria, and in a way that breaks with the standard, let’s call it
‘Parisian’, existentialist interpretation of the work.
If there is one single, overriding fact about L’étranger – it is also the most obvious
but also the most frequently overlooked fact – it is that Meursault is arrested for a
crime, a murder, which is then steadfastly ignored during the totality of his trial. This
overriding fact is also an essential fact because nothing in the novel works without it.
It is the novel’s sine qua non; L’étranger could not be the novel it is without the
repression, almost total, of the crime for which Meursault has been charged.
Let’s look at the facts. The murder is the reason for his arrest; he would not have
found himself arrested and in danger of losing his life unless he had killed the Arab.
However, to develop the sense of injustice in the novel it is imperative that the
murder be immediately forgotten. Otherwise, the trial would not revolve around an
issue completely irrelevant to the accusation. Thus, he has committed murder; of this
we are in no doubt. But then this crime is treated as if it were irrelevant. This is a
point observed by David Carroll, who writes, ‘Even though the shooting [of the
Arab] is the reason for Meursault’s arrest, the victim of the crime and the crime itself
are largely ignored or forgotten during the legal proceedings’.28
Think about the logic of it:
1 Meursault has to commit the crime in order to be arrested. He’s an otherwise
ordinary fellow; he works, has a girlfriend and goes to the beach—it could
almost be a portrayal of some bloke in Sydney. If he hadn’t shot someone then he
would have remained under the radar of the police, just another of our ‘braves
gens’, ‘un gars’, a ‘good bloke’.
2 The murder is the reason why he gets caught up in the legal, penal, policing state,
caught up in what the French philosopher Louis Althusser calls the repressive
state apparatus. He becomes a person of interest as a result of the murder. It is the
initial reason for his being arrested, interrogated, charged, tried, convicted and,
finally, executed.
3 But if it is indeed the cause of this sequence, this is true only on condition that
the murder then be immediately ignored. It is only because the murder is
‘forgotten’ that he can be accused and judged on quite different and basically
irrelevant grounds, such as the fact that he fails to show proper respect to his
mother and mourn her passing.29

28
P. 27.
29
As David Carroll, on whom I draw for this analysis, observes, Camus himself encouraged this
interpretation when he wrote, in 1955, that ‘a man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk
of being sentenced to death’, adding that L’étranger is ‘the story of a man who, without any heroics,
agrees to die for the truth’. (See Camus, A. ‘Preface to The Stranger’, in his Lyrical and Critical Essays,
trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy, ed. Philip Thody. New York: Vintage Books, 1968, 335–337.)
Trial of Albert Camus 601

Thus, we need the crime, the repression of the crime and the irrelevant grounds for
him to become, as he does, a blatant victim of the judicial system. It has –
incidentally – the exact structure of a Freudian symptom, and, as with a symptom, all
sorts of secondary rationalisations overlie it. How often does one hear it said that the
murder of an Arab would generally not result in the conviction of a French Algerian?
This may be true, but it is hardly the point; the logic of the novel requires that
Meursault not be interrogated over his crime but instead over irrelevant issues.
The narrative sometimes goes to almost surreal lengths to maintain this structure –
such as when his defence lawyer actually reminds the court: excuse me, he’s here
because he has been accused of murder! Let’s not forget that!30 Moreover, Meursault
is the chief witness for the prosecution of his own case, since it is his forthright
admission that constitutes the principle evidence. It’s actually quite weird, if you
think about it! It is as if he would have a better chance of getting off the charge of
killing another man than of failing to show appropriate grief at his mother’s funeral.
As Carroll points out, it is ‘as if Meursault could only be condemned to die if the
crime he actually committed was largely ignored’.31 But if this is true, then we have
to accept the converse proposition, which is that he could only have escaped
punishment if he was actually tried for the murder.
This is perverse logic, but nevertheless it is thanks to this perverse logic that
Meursault effectively loses his status as a French citizen – and in the context of
colonial Algeria, this can mean only one thing; he is reduced to the status of an
Arab. This is not just a formal point; it is exactly what happens in the second part of
the novel. The first part of the novel closes powerfully, with the Arab’s murder: ‘I
fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a
mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness’.32 Then
the second part of the book, which is entirely devoted to the trial, gives a
sympathetic portrayal of someone who is the victim of perverse French colonial
‘justice’. This is why the murder has to be ignored – so that the accused can be
judged and condemned for what he is rather than what he has done. And this, as
Camus knew, was the justice that Muslims, Camus’ ‘Arabs’, experienced at the
hands of the French. When Meursault is imprisoned, his fellow prisoners are nearly
all Arabs. When Marie comes to visit him she finds herself in the company of the
‘Moorish women’ of his fellow inmates. When he is asked what he was in prison for
and replies that he has killed an Arab, he is shown how to make his bed.33 He loses
his status as someone who can speak in his own name. His lawyer speaks for him,
even to the point of using the first person pronoun, ‘I’, in his place. He is laughed at
when he says it was because of the rays of the sun that he shot the Arab – how much
better for him it would have been had he argued that it was an act of self-defence!
And so on and so on.
Above all he is considered to be no longer safe, and this is what condemns him in
the end. He is suspect, and thus to be feared, because he does not have the
sentiments of a Frenchman and is not a good, pious Christian. The ‘instructing

30
L’étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 145; The Outsider (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 97.
31
P. 29.
32
The Outsider, trans. Joseph Laredo (London: Penguin, 1983), 60.
33
The Outsider, p. 71.
602 R. Grigg

judge’ would like him to declare himself a Christian. Being Christian was virtually a
prerequisite to becoming a French citizen in Algeria for a Muslim, for Algerian
Muslims could only become French citizens by foreswearing allegiance to Koranic
law, which was such an egregious decision in a Muslim society (such an act would
have effectively meant becoming accepted by neither French nor Muslim
communities) that by 1936 only 2,500 Arabs or Berbers had taken this step.34
Being reduced to the status of an Arab, Meursault is then judged on his ‘soul’, his
‘nature’, and he is found wanting – the judge calls him a ‘monster’, and not for his
crime for which, if he had played the game, he would never have been executed, but
on the basis of who he is. In the end, Meursault is indeed executed for being ‘other’,
an outsider; but what is usually missed, even though it is exceedingly obvious in the
novel, is that Meursault’s transformation into an outsider and thus his gradually
exclusion him from the society of the pieds noirs not only brings him to dwell
amongst Arabs but also renders him similar in nature to them – with fateful
consequences for him.
Of course, Meursault is executed for being ‘Other’, an Outsider – but I hope that I
have shown you that whatever universalism Camus’ outsider expresses, his narrative
is also rooted historically in the context of the French colonial presence in Algeria,
and this means that the outsider is, concretely, Arab.

34
Evans, M., & Phillips, J. (2007). Algeria: Anger of the dispossessed. New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 31.